


From cliché to self-parody.

by werepope (quiteparadise)



Series: 2014 Advent Calendar for a Filthy-Minded Athiest [17]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: And joy, Cliche, M/M, With all due apologies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 00:32:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2793287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiteparadise/pseuds/werepope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It goes like this: they're friends, and they fucked once, and it was great until it wasn't.  What a shame they can't keep pretending it didn't happen.</p><p> </p><p>Advent calendar challenge: Cancellations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From cliché to self-parody.

This is what characters in romantic comedies must feel like. He understands now why no one ever seems capable of responding to things appropriately in those movies. The sheer, unbelievable stupidity of the situation renders them incapable of anything except gut reaction. This is what he has been reduced to.

"You have one room left," he says. He feels this is the sort of thing which deserves absolute confirmation. And if the clerk behind the counter is unamused at having to repeat herself for the third time, then so be it. Liam isn't terribly amused either.

"Yes, sir. All flights are grounded until tomorrow because of the snow. We're booked. As is every other hotel in the vicinity."

Liam really doesn't appreciate the tone, the clipped, barely-there sentences. It's no less than he deserves, really, but he frowns all the same. It's a good excuse to.

"It's a single," he says.

She nods a slow, single up and down.

He swears. He casts a glance over his shoulder, into the tired milling of bodies in the lobby, to catch a glimpse of Zayn, still on his mobile. He has one shoulder hunched up to try and block out some of the noise and he's curled down slightly. Liam can't see much of his face but what he can see looks vaguely distressed. He swears again.

The clerk clears her throat. "If you'd like, you can try other hotels, but." She looks over his other shoulder, where there are people waiting, looking just as desperate as him.

"No," he says. He closes his eyes. "No, thank you. I'll take the room, please."

Behind him, the queue groans. No more room at the inn.

This shouldn't be a problem. An irritation? Yes. An inconvenience? Absolutely. But if this had happened even a few weeks ago, it wouldn't warrant the way the muscles of his back clench right between his shoulders, tight enough to snap, as if all of his stress has settled in to make sure he's as miserable as possible.

A few weeks ago, he and Zayn were friends. They had been friends for years. Since Liam's first day at the office. Since Louis invaded his cubicle, hands full of a brownie wrapped in cling-film, a cup of tea, a stack of blue paper, and said: "Fax these for me, will you? There's a lad."

It had been Zayn who'd found him in the copy room, scanner whirring through page eight of twenty-three. Zayn who had smiled and told him to never, ever trust Louis and cancelled the job from the queue. There was a sparkle in his eye which told Liam that trust shouldn't be placed with him either, but then during lunch, his supervisor spent ten minutes explaining why copying and faxing from color paper was frowned upon – while Louis stood in the doorway, shaking his head and clucking disapproval until Zayn dragged him physically away.

A few weeks ago, he and Zayn were friends. Then they slept together.

Liam blames himself, because that's just what he does. It wasn't entirely his fault, though. Zayn was at the trailing end of a breakup that had been going on for almost as long as the relationship itself. Liam had gotten a call two days before that the test results from his father's biopsy had come back positive. They were both emotionally fragile. They'd both needed reassurance – the simple comfort of a sympathetic touch. And maybe Liam had been thinking about touching Zayn in other ways for some time, but he hadn't intended on acting on it. Zayn had kissed him first.

Awkward doesn't even behind to describe it. Not the sex. The sex had been good. The problem had been the morning after. The waking up naked with Zayn's hair in his mouth. The look of horror on Zayn's face as he scrambled back from Liam so fast he fell off the edge of the bed. The dark suck mark on Zayn's neck that he rubbed at unconsciously the next day, until Louis made a comment and Zayn told him to piss off, nothing like humor in his voice.

A few weeks ago they slept together, stressing their friendship to the point of fracture, and now they're stuck sharing a hotel room.

Liam's life should have a laugh track. One that he could actually hear, so the could tell the difference between a joke and a minor tragedy.

The good news is that Zayn seems just as miserable about the situation. The bad news is that Zayn seems miserable about the situation.

"It's fine," Zayn says, dropping his bag onto the desk and rooting around for his toiletry case. Liam tries not to think that this is a convenient excuse not to have to look at him. He fails.

"Right."

"We're both tired. We'll just go to bed," Zayn says, shutting himself into the toilet so that he doesn't have to worry about Liam having anything to say in response. As if he would have. As if he'd have taken this as an opportunity to talk about his feelings or something.

"Right."

Liam sits on the edge of the bed to wait for his turn. When he finishes putting on his pajamas and brushing his teeth, Zayn is already under the covers on the far side of the bed, overheard light switched off. He is curled loosely in on himself, back to the room. He mumbles "goodnight" once Liam's settled in on his own side, a gulf of over-bleached white sheet between them, the blanket suspended like the dip of a telephone wire from Liam's shoulder to Zayn's.

Liam lays stiff and vaguely agonized for what feels like ages, counting down on every exhale from five hundred. He falls asleep finally somewhere in the three hundred range, between one number and the next.

He wakes to light coming from around the edge of the black-out curtain, the sound of someone else's wake-up call ringing through in the room next door, and Zayn's hair in his mouth. It tastes like styling gel smells, citrusy and chemical. When he tries to roll away, extricate himself, save them both the humiliation of another jump-scare wake-up, Zayn stirs. He rolls his loose, warm weight back into Liam. At which point Liam realizes that he's also woken to an erection, impossible to miss now that it's nudging into Zayn's bony hip.

Liam jerks back so hard he tumbles right over the edge of the bed.

Unseen above him, the "laugh" sign flips on and the audience roars at his, arguably hilarious, misfortune.

Liam throws his arm over his face to muffle his groan and so he doesn't see Zayn above him either, peering down at him from the high ground of the mattress.

"Been there," Zayn says.

Liam drops his arm to glare at him. "I remember."

Zayn levers himself up onto one elbow to offer him a hand up. "It's much better being the one up here."

"This is what I deserve," Liam says, to himself, for the sake of the audience. "Leave me."

"Nah." Zayn lets his hand flop down, onto Liam's knee. "No one deserves that."

Liam looks at the loose curl of Zayn's fingers and then, finally, up at his face. He's smiling a little. In the dim light from the window, he looks almost sheepish.

"I don't know. People who freak out unnecessarily about waking up with another person – a friendly person who they knowingly went to bed with – should probably have to stay on the floor and think about what they've done."

Zayn sighs. He pats Liam's knee and then disappears from the edge of the bed. Liam stares at the empty space for a while thinking _yes, I definitely deserve this_ until Zayn speaks again, voice disembodied: "Do we have to do this as a hypothetical?"

Liam shrugs and crosses his arms over his chest. "If you'd rather not..."

"I did think about it," Zayn says. "A lot. I'm sorry I was an idiot and fell out of bed with you."

Liam pulls his limbs into enough semblance of order to sit up. He crosses his arms against the bed this time. "Because?"

Zayn just looks at him for a moment, and Liam hopes like hell this isn't the pause for effect before the punchline. "Because you didn't deserve that. You're right. About people knowingly going to bed with people and then freaking out."

"Oh." Liam should have hoped for something more, instead of less. A failed joke is probably worse than no joke at all.

"And because I've been a coward."

"Oh?"

Zayn sighs and scrubs his hands over his face. The sound of his fingers in his scruff is familiar and rather wonderful. "I'd like you to come back to bed now," he says, which is even more wonderful.

So Liam does.


End file.
